In Season 2, Episode 8 of UX Leadership By Design, host Mark Baldino speaks with Evan English, Vice President of Design and User Research at American Express. Evan shares her journey from product management to UX leadership at Amex, where she has spent 15 years. She highlights the company’s significant investment in leadership training and development, which has allowed her to build a strong design leadership team from within the organization. They discuss the importance of aligning design work with business value, the challenges and rewards of building a mature design system, and the strategic role of information architecture in delivering business results.
Key Takeaways
- Leadership behaviors, such as communication, collaboration, and empathy, are crucial for UX leaders.
- Designers possess unique qualities that make them great leaders, including empathy, active listening, storytelling, and systems thinking (dot connectors).
- Shared goals with product partners and design maturity goals are important for driving business value.
- Information architecture and design systems play a critical role in supporting the evolving business needs.
- Measuring metrics and setting goals are essential for tracking the impact of design efforts and improving customer satisfaction.
About Our Guest
Evan English is the Vice President of Design & User Research at American Express. In this role, she leads a multi-disciplinary global design organization for the company’s mobile, web and push channels. Her team’s mission is to make American Express an essential touchpoint in customers’ lives via differentiated digital experiences.
Resources & Links
Chapters
- Introduction to Digital Transformation
- The Essence of Digital Transformation
- Legacy Systems and Their Modernization
- Recognizing the Need for Change
- Challenges and Solutions in Digital Overhauls
- Managing Risk and Ensuring Successful Implementation
- Incremental Improvement and Future-Proofing
- The Role of Leadership in Transformation Initiatives
Transcript
Mark Baldino (00:01.944) Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also the co -founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Evan English, Vice President of Design and User Research at American Express. We talk, surprise, surprise, about being a leader of UXers growing the next generation of UX leaders. Evan is unique as her background was originally in product management and shifted to UX. And Amex is unique in how they invest heavily in leadership, training, and development. This has allowed Evan to utilize that process and encourage and establish her leadership team, which is currently all made up of existingAmex sort of designers that have moved into leadership roles, which is really, really rare and I think really impressive. And along the way, they've done an amazing job. They've established a UX center of excellence that sits horizontally within their organization. We talk about how they deliver. And most importantly, we talk about a topic that's near and dear to me that I talk to my team about just about every day, which is how designers need to align with and deliver on business value. And Evan clearly articulates how you can make that happen within your organization. And even how something is sort of simple as information architecture, maybe simple and overlooked or overlooked and seen as tactical, is actually something that can deliver on business value. So this episode is jam -packed with goodness for those who are already leading design teams and those maybe who are looking to advance their careers into design leadership. So please enjoy and thanks for listening. Mark Baldino (00:01.549) Evan, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Evan (00:04.376) Thank you for having Mark Baldino (00:06.031) Fantastic. Excited for our conversation today. As always, would love to hear a little bit about your background, where you've been, where you're at now. And as this is a podcast about UX leadership, would love to hear about your journey to becoming a UX leader. Evan (00:21.806) Yeah, I would love to share. So I guess a fun fact about me is I've only worked at two companies. So I started my career at Scholastic, which is a children's media publishing company. And I've been at Amex now for, it'll be 15 years next year. And most of my career has been in, I would say, product management and different variations of the role over the years as the industry has evolved. I started doing a bunch as many young professionals do in their career, a lot of different jack of all trades types of roles when I was at Scholastic, but found myself working in digital partnerships and that sort of segued into digital product management and then found my way at Amex in a digital product role, starting in the merchant business. And that's actually probably when I truly started to pursue a more UX oriented career because the work that we were doing at the time was redesigning our merchant. facing experiences globally for Amex. And that was also the team where we started to bring designers in, in -house. We were working with a lot of agencies back then, but as we were going through our digital evolution and transformation and looking to be more efficient with how we were working, it started to make sense to bring design talent in. And turns out that was happening in pockets across the rest of the company. And then over the years, as I grew into my product roles, I found myself leading bigger design teams that were embedded in my product team. But eventually, a leader of mine decided we need to start investing in this more. And she created a role to centralize. At the time, it was focused mostly on the membership side of our business, so all of the digital -facing channels that reach our customers. Mark Baldino (02:11.44) Yep. Evan (02:14.702) And we started relatively small, but that was the, I would say the beginning of where I'm at now. And that was back in 2019, I believe. And just last year we sent, did some more versions of centralizing where we brought our membership and acquisition design teams together. And we are now, I would say well suited to support our organization across the journey, the digital journey starting at the acquisition. funnel and through to that membership side. And we're starting to put more design against internal platforms and tools as well. And the organization I'm in is called Enterprise Digital and Data Solutions. And really, we look after a lot of the core digital experiences and digital assets at an enterprise level. But there are other business units in the company that focus on digital and also have built out design teams within those spaces. So it's great to just see the investment across the enterprise. Mark Baldino (03:14.745) Yeah. Well, I'd love to get into that sort of how the team went from pockets to more shared and maybe that relationship. But first, I just want to ask, my audience on the podcast is kind of a blend of, there's a lot of UX designers, UX leaders, but also product management folks, product leaders. What was that transition like? Did it feel severe? Was it just a natural? Were you cautious or anxious about going from being product manager to UX or did it all feel like, this all kind of makes Evan (03:44.34) Yeah, definitely, when my leader asked me to do the role at the time, I definitely was like a little bit like, well, this will be temporary. And I'm just, you know, she was really looking, think, for someone who was a good leader, who understood the space, who could speak the language, who could advocate for the team. And I had always really in my product role leaned more on the UX side of the role versus the technical side. So it did come a bit naturally. And I actually think my time at Scholastic, I had always worked with lots graphic designers and creatives, that was always a discipline we had embedded in the culture of the company. But that being said, I did take my transition quite seriously. And fortunately, I was an English major, so used to reading a lot of books. And I just went straight to the books and I read a lot of books and was outlining things and meeting with lots of people. the first thing I did actually is I went to a design leadership camp that was sponsored by a for -profit organization, but they partnered with InVision at the time. And that was really, really great foundational learning because I got to meet with a lot of design leaders and just pick their brain. And I honestly just absorbed the entire three days I was there. So it was intimidating, but I think at the end of the day, It was the leadership piece that she was really looking forward and emphasizing. And so that made me feel like, OK, I'm going to start to approach this with a leadership mindset, but also a product mindset. Because that was where my background was. And so it was like the team almost became my product. so, yeah, so it was interesting. But then now here I am five years later. I think it's five years later. Mark Baldino (05:29.403) 2019 to 2024, amazingly, yeah, five years. What was the biggest... I work with lot of design leaders or UX team leads who don't have in their background being designers. What's the biggest challenge there as somebody who doesn't have the skill... Maybe you've built some of the skillsets, but you haven't been, know, your career wasn't spent, I should say, being a designer and then moved into a manager and a leader. It was in product and understanding. You did like a kind of a self bootcamp to get yourself ready. But what do you find was or is the biggest challenge when you're leading a group of people and you maybe haven't done all of the work that you're asking them to Evan (06:09.238) Yeah, I I think it's the technical skill sets at the end of the day. Like I don't have training and design foundations and some of the tooling and the technical pieces and the craft, right? So, you know, I think you really have to empower the leaders under you who do have that. And you really just need to trust that you've got a really, really talented team who do know what they're doing. so, and then I'm like, you know, leverage me for the strengths that I do have, right? And that's what you have to recognize if you're jumping into a role where you're leading a team where you don't necessarily have the same technical skill sets, but you've got shared skill sets or strengths in other areas. And to be honest, our team is so diversified now in our skill sets and disciplines that we have, like design operations, user research, where I feel like I can lean into some of those and help build that up. And I've got really strong product design VPs who are completely empowered to really own that the craft of design and that technical excellence we're looking for. But I do think that's a challenge. Like at the end of the day, I'm not going to go into Figma and like, you know, not going to be kicking out a prototype tomorrow. Mark Baldino (07:23.929) Right. And probably as you said, not only not a strength, but also, you know, it's not what your team probably needs and instead. Evan (07:31.648) No, nobody really want that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I get scared when I'm lurking in figma now, you know, seeing what's up, but yeah. Mark Baldino (07:37.591) Right. Watching the cursor move around is terrifying. And as somebody who's never used Figma as a designer, my actual UI design days are long past. But I appreciate the... I mean, you can do it. And for folks that are listening now, the advice is you can lead a group of designers in this case, but other folks where you don't share the technical skill set, but some advice is figure out what your strengths are that you can lean into, that you're going to be bringing from a leadership perspective, and surround yourself with... crafts people, technicians, people who have the technical expertise that can sort of translate your leadership down and can provide guidance around the technical components to the team as it scales. I think that's actually a much more scalable model. Because I think that there's a lot of folks who are designers that want to stay on that technical track and don't want to get into people management or even a level of leadership. But I'd love to shift and talk about it you said your... sort of, I don't know if it your manager, but your leader said, hey, I want you to take this over and I want you to focus on leading this group and developing this group. from your perspective, what makes somebody a good or great leader? How do you help guide people into, from good to great leadership? How does maybe your organization at Amex support that process and kind of what does the leadership look Evan (09:02.198) Yeah, so I think one of the most amazing things about AMEX and probably one of the reasons I've stayed here for as long as I have is the focus on leadership. And I remember being almost like in shell shock when I came in, it was the training you get here is pretty remarkable in terms of the leadership skills that you can develop. And we have something called. our blue box leadership principles or behaviors, leadership behaviors, and they're really ingrained in the way that we approach everything and even how we measure performance. It's not just about the outcomes we're driving. It's like the what, but then there's the how you did it at the end of the day. So did you collaborate well? Did you bring others along? Are you communicating frequently, clearly? Are you leading with an external perspective? Are you driving strategies forward in an approach that looks at multiple perspectives, but also takes an enterprise approach as well? So there's all sorts of leadership behaviors that not only guide the way we work, but are embedded in the way we think about development and training. And I would say that's the second piece, which is just the focus on the training and the development. Evan (10:24.026) the culture of feedback too. And I think that's actually a really important leader skill to develop is, you know, we think about feedback just being a thing we do, but you actually have to practice that and learn how to approach it, which is also a really important designer skill set too, right? Cause the art of critiques and learning how to take that feedback in. So yeah, I mean, I think those are a few things that come to mind. I always put a strong attention on the communication piece. honestly be, I think that's one of the most important. leadership qualities, right? Just being able to communicate authentically, being transparent, telling a story, being strategic about how you communicate, collaboration. You can't get anything done in a big company like this without collaborating. And honestly, it's not just about building relationships to get things done around here. You really need to bring others' perspectives in as well. You know, it's not just about our users' perspectives, but the broader business perspectives that we need to collect to make the right decision at the end of the day. So those are a few things that come top of mind. But yeah, I think it comes back to those leadership behaviors that are very much indoctrinated into the DNA of how we work. Mark Baldino (11:39.739) It's fantastic. think probably a lot of people listening are jealous that it's part of the DNA at Amex, that they give you a framework to work within and grow within and that they're willing to invest because that's a long -term investment, right? Having somebody be a leader, obviously you've been, I think you should say 15 years, you've spent a long time, that investment's paid off for them, but not all organizations will make those long -term investments to help train and build leaders. take whoever's Evan (11:54.54) Yes. Mark Baldino (12:09.007) technically proficient or who's been there the longest and they get moved into maybe a lead position or a people manager position and don't always offer the training necessary or the time to let people grow into those roles. It's sort of like, hey, somebody left or we have this new need. And so that's, it's really impressive. I can tell you feel like you're fortunate to work there and fantastic for the folks you work with at Amex. You mentioned one component of sort of designers, which are doing design critiques, giving feedback. stakeholder management, stakeholder communication or skills I think a lot of designers want to and need to grow in. But what do you see is like unique about the designers you work with that you think actually makes them great leaders or different leaders? What do you think are some areas that really people who lead teams of designers should recognize in their group that make them unique when you're putting them to leadership roles? Evan (13:02.946) Yeah, I believe designers are, you know, they're very well suited to be leaders. In fact, I've had people on my team who are hesitant about like growing into leadership roles that to your point, want to sort of stay in the craft and behind the scenes. We sort of said, no, we actually think you can do this well, like step up and they're natural leaders. And I think that speaks to a few things that come to mind. One, I do think designers and researchers are just naturally very empathetic. I think really good active listeners. I think they are uniquely suited to, again, back to the point I made about user perspective, like it's just a natural part of the job is listening to customers. And I think they do that not just with our external customers, but our internal customers as well, like our internal stakeholder groups. really balancing perspective well and bringing that back into the work. And now the work that they do is so strategic in nature that they are seen as valued strategic partners because of that. I also think the really good storytellers and dot connectors as well. So I see the value that my team brings in through that dot connecting. And I think that speaks to the systems, the systems thinking that comes with UX and being able to strategically thread together. you know, all the different complex pieces that we're working on and be able to almost zoom out and provide that strategic connectivity for the broader organization. Those are a few things that come to mind. I think there are people in other disciplines that do that well too, but I think the skill sets that are developed as a designer early on just lend themselves well to some of the things I mentioned. And obviously it doesn't hurt when you've got like a good visual design background and you can bring stories to life through visuals. And that really helps too in terms of the communication piece we talked Mark Baldino (15:08.143) Yep. Yeah. I really like the connector one or the system level thinking because when I think about my own team and seeing that strength on particular projects, I do think the majority of cases, those individuals are able to step up into design leadership roles and be connectors on top of communication skills and storytelling and empathy, which is something you also need to kind of work on and develop. As you said, I think it's very I this all the time. I think it's easier to empathize with end users or customers sometimes than it is with our coworkers or stakeholders. Because sometimes we feel like, well, they're getting in our way of what we want to do. But actually, you have to be empathetic towards key stakeholders internal because they are the ones that are going to help you get your good ideas out into the open. Evan (15:58.104) That's right. I know this is probably like an, maybe an overuse term at this point, this notion of co -creation, but it stems in many ways from doing user research, Having customers participate in the creation of the designs. And that very much is like working itself into the ethos of how we do work with our partners and our engineers as well. Now we do a lot of what we call value co -creation. And I think at the end of the day, it is about, you know, getting closer to being in other people's shoes and having those shuttles early. Mark Baldino (16:29.679) Yeah. Yeah, I like, I very much like to use the term co -creation because I feel like when we're starting a project against consultancy, it's a little bit different, but we have a number of stakeholders and we're going to bring kind of our expertise as designers and researchers and experience we have in other projects. We're going to combine that with what we can learn from customers or users. But the third component is what we can learn from subject matter experts or stakeholders or our client. And it's you avoid one of those, you put yourself into a difficult position. And when you lean on all three of them, I think, you can design and develop something that's really, powerful. And I think this is a good reminder for design leaders that those skills you talked about, communication, empathy, dot connecting, storytelling, we need to develop these when people are earlier in their career, because it's not just so that they can become a technical expert, which hopefully if they want to do that, they can. But because if we develop those skills earlier, they can start to exhibit them and then be more prepared for kind of leadership roles. I do want to go back to one thing which I think is really, really interesting, which is you had a lot of people who said, I want to stay technical and I just want to work on my craft. And you were like, no, no, no, I think you, I don't know if you say you have it in you. Like, what was the moment and how do you know when it's right to like give somebody Evan (17:40.783) Thanks. Mark Baldino (17:56.251) push into something more than they have self -identified that Evan (18:02.342) One of the best indicators for me is when I see how they're leading their peers or more maybe junior members of the team, even if they don't directly report to them. That is seen, I think, more than people think. I definitely, when I see that, I say, okay, well, I think they're probably ready to lead a team because they are doing it. They're just not doing it with that like official, you know, line, I suppose, right in the the org chart. So that's one indicator. you know, the other the other is just how they operate with their partners as well, how they're influencing. And, you know, sometimes there's an expressed interest or curiosity in it, you can kind of extract that out as well. But there's a hesitation and you sort of just have to put maybe some stuff into practice to make them see that they are ready as well. So combination of tactics and observing, but yeah, it's funny because I think back to like five years ago when we were still growing the team and recruiting and trying to bring in design leadership and it's like, well, we actually have some really good design. leadership potential here. And we have the toolkit as we talked about before that framework. So let's just apply it and grow the team this way. so almost all of our VPs, all of our directors, I would say the majority have grown through the company, within the company, which I think is really a fun stat. Mark Baldino (19:41.859) It's fantastic and I think not the standard. And so does say a lot for the environment there and the time and attention and energy that's put into developing leaders, which is fantastic. So you mentioned that the UX team, people were doing UX in pockets and then there was this impetista, let's bring them all under the same umbrella. And I think as you mentioned, you're kind of working at like an enterprise. level. is that like, you're now a horizontal, you're doing like design operations, design systems, and then there's people still working in pockets. Can you walk us through like kind of what the structure is Evan (20:10.862) That's right. Evan (20:20.396) Yeah. So we sit in an organization that does have product management responsibilities for a lot of the big channels like AmEx .com and the mobile app and our communications channels and our data platforms and how we handle identity, like all these enterprise assets that we have. And so we're staffing design against many of the things that sit within our organization. And There are other business units that are going deeper on parts of the broader business like commercial, our resi dining app, travel, things like that, where that domain expertise is needed, right? And you need to keep those designers adjacent to the business. And so there are design teams and other parts of the organization, but we, we act as like one community. We have a, you know, we do have an enterprise design community that's pretty active and it's all about, you know, shared passions and sharing ideas and sharing ways of building skillsets, things like that. So we stay connected. We also have a really awesome in -house creative agency in the brand group. So we partner closely with them on more of visual identity and the branding elements. They're the brand design experts. We lean into the UX and product design space. But again, it's all about just making sure we have mechanisms and forums for connectivity. And again, that shared love of design and the craft. So it's a nice little model. But we do sit in an enterprise center of excellence group. And I think you even mentioned the word horizontal. It really, yeah. And so the design systems and a lot of the, you know, framework key things do so in our team. Mark Baldino (22:12.571) Right. Right. And was part of your impetus over the past five years to build those systems? How is that gone? Where are they now? I feel like a lot of large organizations invested a lot in design systems and didn't always see their return on investment. Maybe the design team did, but like the organization didn't. How's that operationalized or systemized? How's that gone for your Evan (22:34.742) Yeah. Yeah, we have a really mature design system. I actually, I inherited that through, you know, previous teams that saw the light to create one, but it has gone through a lot of evolution. have systems that support different technology platforms too. I should also say we have a brand system. So we have an overarching brand design system. And then we have more technical design systems with, that are aligned to the platforms we're building for, so web, iOS, Android, even email. And so we have like subsystems under the master system. And they're all in different versions because they all started at different points of time for different reasons. But they're all centralized under one design VP who is working towards thinking through what is the next big iteration for our design system. I would say. The reason I consider it mature is because it is so widely used and all those other design teams I mentioned that we work with are all users of the design system and also engineers who don't necessarily have design teams, but they can leverage the design system. I would say we still very much value it. It's not always applied the way we would want to see it. Sometimes we've got to lean in and provide some consulting. I would say one area where we're headed though is trying to figure out, think one area of opportunity is trying to figure out like, how do we nail the contribution model and make it feel like, you know, we don't want it to feel like it's like one design system to rule them all. Like we need to have more of a sort of a flexible framework to think through how other design teams contribute into the system, how we, you know, we identify unique patterns that other teams are creating. How do we then adopt those patterns? But yeah, still early days on how we're thinking about that, but there's small pockets of that happening that's helping to define how we do that. But yeah, it's still very much a critical priority for us. Mark Baldino (24:41.829) That's great. And I think you mentioned the adoption adherence. That's good key KPIs in terms of input. I should say output and effectiveness. Earlier you touched on, and I think this is an area that I'm really interested in. I'm always talking to my team of designers on, which is like, how can you drive business value? How can you recognize the value you bring to, in our case, clients and to users? How can you understand business? Evan (24:48.14) Yeah. Mark Baldino (25:11.491) at a high level of our clients and the business value that we're, you how do get that business value alignment? Like what are some tips, tricks, skills? What are you working on with your team? What are ways that you feel like are standard or non -standard ways that you're sort of driving business value at MX? Evan (25:27.404) Yeah. So there's like three kind of core buckets that come to mind. One is we really emphasize like first and foremost, the shared goals with the product partners that they have, right? Like they're like lockstep with their product peers and leaders in terms of like those shared OKRs early. And so I think early days it was like, well, what are our design team goals? I'm like, well, our design team goals are very much aligned to our product and engineering partners. Like, so we just, we have shared goals around satisfaction, revenue, engagement, conversions, performance, et cetera. So that's a big focus, right? Because at the end of the day, if we were going off and creating our own KPIs, that wouldn't work. And I think that works well because then they can celebrate success together. It starts the project off well, and when you get something out to market, then you're celebrating the same success story. The second big bucket though is the design maturity of practice goals that we think about. And I would say, and one example would be that design systems usage or design system satisfaction that we have. But we've developed some KPIs that ladder up to core, what I would call like design ops themes that are important to our team. it goes back to what I was saying about like we're running the, me and my leadership team, we're running the team like a product in many ways where it's like we have a roadmap for where we see ourselves. What are those milestones we have to put in place to get there and how do we measure it along the way? And so those to me are like, that's the ethos of our design ops practice and our goals there. So, you know, give the design systems metrics one as an example, but also just how do we measure the impact of the research we're doing by having a more like a percentage that shows we're doing more research early and upfront versus just a bunch of an evaluative research at the end kind of brushing the usability out the door just to check a box right so measuring those types of effectiveness and just the quality of how we're working I suppose and then the last thing we're looking Evan (27:45.826) And this is still early days, but we're starting to put more operational reporting together. We've built out a system to help just track the way we're working. And I even hesitate to use the word track because I think we don't want to be in this like not tracking the work, like right down to the like task level. But we do want to just have some data that allows us to see just the impact we're having at scale based off. the delivery at the end of the day and also where we are in the life cycle of development and the amount of effort that sort of cuts across. And so it's still early, like we're putting the framework together and we're defining a taxonomy around that and just making sure we're using consistent units of measurement. I think it will take time to see trends that actually then influence. the value we get out of those metrics. I just, it's like, we just have to get it going and get into the habit of it. And then I think we will see the value of what that system offers us when it's a bit more mature. So there's like a shared goal metric. There's a design ops I'll get that people rally around and get excited about. And then there's this like operational bucket that we're still defining. And that's probably an area I would love to talk to more like design leaders about just to see how they're approaching that piece. Mark Baldino (29:06.479) You bet. Well, any design leaders listening to the podcast, if you want to reach out to Evan to chat about this, I think the three areas of free puck that you mentioned are super, super interesting. What's kind of next for your design team? What are the new challenges you guys are tackling? Where are you headed to in the near future? Evan (29:09.39) Please help. Evan (29:25.942) Yeah, this isn't really a new one, but it's definitely a big one. And we've been paving the runway for a bit, but it's starting to really amp up as we put a lot more focus across channel level IA. So obviously, information architecture is embedded in the design process at the page level, the journey level. But as the American Express business has evolved, our digital channels need to evolve to support that. you know, we needed to again zoom out and really think about structure and the way that information's organized and information being everything, literally everything, features, components, journeys, the navigation system. And it's hard. It's challenging, but we've made some really good progress. We had a big mobile app release last summer, our version seven of our mobile app, which was a lot of fundamental IA work started to see the light of day through that release, just new navigation patterns. We restructured the app to better support banking products and just non -card products. And that's what I mean by the business is evolving. Like we're just not doing credit cards. And the channels were designed originally for credit cards. And now we're doing so much more in banking and in lifestyle. services that we need to think about it different. We've got to change the paradigm. And so that's where the IA work becomes really exciting for me and I think for a lot of my team. And we've got great product partners who've created roles to help support that. So it's nice to see it's like really starting to come to fruition. Mark Baldino (31:10.683) Great. I think I started my career as an information architect. I still love the process of it. I like this problem solving nature of it, but it's really nice when you can align that with where Amex is going as a business. This is a fundamental thing we need to rethink because the business is heading in this direction and it's not as easy as just switching between one context and the next. They need to live together in a much more complex ecosystem. Evan (31:33.676) Right. Yeah. And it was like, even though there's infinite space, right, there isn't like you've got to structure things thinking about sort of how customers see it. And, you know, we were just shoving stuff in and it was like, what, where there's white space, put a link there, you know, here's another entry point to a future we need to make discoverable. And it was just, it was starting to like, that was starting to show from a fragmentation and breaking down the customer experience standpoint. And we were seeing it in our satisfaction scores too. Like we were seeing dips in navigation, CSAT and things like that. So, but now we're seeing an uptick. Mark Baldino (32:11.995) Yeah, that's great. That's great. But you have to, as you point, have to measure these things so that you can actually, maybe part of it is delivering business value or looking at return on investment. You don't have the metrics in place. You can't monitor any of it. Business stakeholders can easily kind of push it aside and say it's not important, but I think it's a credit to the group you've built and your many partners that you're working with and kind of the systems you have in place and the metrics you're tracking that you're able to step back and take time and like, let's on IA and Journey review and overhaul because that's something that some people might not see as actually having any ROI. No, let's just add it. already have, we have these four categories, just add it down to category four or something like that. It takes time and energy to invest in Evan (32:53.368) Right. It's interesting you say that because this IA journey we started going on was running in parallel to changes we made and how we measure digital satisfaction. And we were implementing new survey types and we were rolling that survey out across all the markets we support and just really maturing the way that we measure digital satisfaction and the drivers behind that. And it's interesting just to see that correlation. start to really amp up, for lack of a better word, because we're starting to see those metrics. And they just continue to support the business case for why information architecture and navigation and all of that is still very important. And just looking at the experience more holistically, because I think we go so deep in specific journeys sometimes that you sort of lose sight of the holistic picture and how all of these things tether together for a customer. evolving the way we measure satisfaction has really changed the way we think about that as well. So it's been nice to see those two things maturing in parallel with one another. Mark Baldino (34:04.924) Well, I just want to say thank you so much for your time and the conversation. think the business value strategy and something that looks tactical like IA but actually does deliver strategic value is a great place to wrap up today. But I just want to commend you on the team you've built and the group you're running and the processes and systems you have in place and kind of delivery your offerings. I think it's a fantastic model for a bunch of folks who are UX teams. People want to find you. assume LinkedIn is a good place to search, find you, and connect. Evan (34:38.422) Yeah, welcome on there. Yes, I'm on there. And thanks for having me, Mark. It's been a good conversation. Mark Baldino (34:46.255) Yeah, no, thank you, Evan, for your time and energy today. I know the audience and listeners are going to really enjoy it. So thanks again. Evan (34:53.868) You are welcome.